The paunchy middle aged American tourist bedecked with Minolta camera and Fijian print shirt hasn't done a great deal for the American image abroad. However. Richard Gere in his plausible performance as Mathew, a drafted American private in the film Yanks, now on at the Embassy Theatre, does much to dispel the 'yank generalisation' and proves that there are some good guys after all.

Plotwise, Yanks is relatively simple. It takes place at the time when the American forces were flooding into Britain to offer support in World War II. Similarly regarded when they swarmed into New Zealand, the English considered them to be bumptious and bawdy, taking over both the country and the women while the local boys were away fighting in the trenches.

The film opens with the US army tracks zooming through the rolling English countryside, transporting the American boys en masse to the outskirts of a small English town "godknows where" at the end of 1948

They are greeted with Red Cross doughnuts and hot coffee and rife speculation that "the English girls in these parts haven't seen a man in months ". And what better incentive for obtaining a "pass'. It is Molly (Wendy Norton) the flaxen haired bus conductress who initiates all the action in the film when she hands two movie tickets to two likely looking 'yanks' on her bus. Thus Mathew (Richard Gere) first encounters Jean (Lisa Eichhorn), a fresh faced English girl whose parents run the local general store in town, selling everything from sticky buns to bicycle clips to rationed oranges. Romance flourishes, though initially rather rocky, as Jean is shortly to become engaged to her 'plain sailing' sweetheart, stolid Ken.